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Thursday, May 31, 2012

The Obama administration considers any military-age male in the vicinity of a bombing to be a combatant. That is an amazing standard that shares an ugly synergy with the sort of broad-swath logic that we see employed in Stop and Frisk, with NYPD national spy network, with the killer of Trayvon Martin.

Policy is informed by the morality of a country. I think the repercussions of this unending era of death by silver bird will be profound.

For more background on this truly vile, reprehensible and heinous policy of defining "militant" to include any of-age males killed by a drone strike, see Glenn Greenwald (here and here).

The claim that "our side" never targets civilians is familiar doctrine among those who monopolize the means of violence. And there is some truth to it. We do not generally try to kill particular civilians. Rather, we carry out murderous actions that we know will slaughter many civilians, but without specific intent to kill particular ones. In law, the routine practices might fall under the category of depraved indifference, but that is not an adequate designation for standard imperial practice and doctrine. It is more similar to walking down a street knowing that we might kill ants, but without intent to do so, because they rank so low that it just doesn't matter.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." - George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Saturday, May 26, 2012

"Was the United States founded as a Christian nation, meaning that the framers of the Constitution established a government whose laws would not only reflect but also enforce the rules of a particular brand of Christianity? No, period." - Susan Jacoby, "The Christian Nation Fiction, Then and Now"

Monday, May 21, 2012

"One has to wonder at the size of the egos of ... people who would readily put their own ideological opinions above the constitutional guarantees of an entire nation." - Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

"[E]verything we know of Hitler suggests that, once finished with the Jews, he would have targeted for elimination, one way or another, those whose loyalty to Jesus competed with loyalty to the Third Reich. But the absolute priority given to Jews in Hitler's scheme; their place as the extreme negative in volk mythology, standing against everything the Third Reich was meant to be; their place, therefore, as the embodiment of an evil to be elimatinated at all costs - all of this built upon the Jew hatred ... that has been an unbroken thread of Christian history, not just since the Crusades, but beyond Constantine, almost back to the time of the crucifixion itself." - James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History